


How To Broker The Conversation

by lasergirl



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: BAMF Phil Coulson, Castration, First Time, M/M, NOT castration fic, Old Injuries, just fic where someone has been castrated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-16
Updated: 2013-02-16
Packaged: 2017-11-29 13:17:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/687379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lasergirl/pseuds/lasergirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eventually, Phil doesn't have anything left to hide from Clint. And it turns out pretty well.</p><p>Notes are at the end. My many, many thanks to Perpetual Motion for the beta.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How To Broker The Conversation

It starts when Phil is shirtless in the tiny safe house bathroom, shaving the three days worth of stubble from his face and avoiding the darkened bruise on the corner of his jaw. The mission could have gone worse. Clint had been holed up in the rafters of an ancient waterfront warehouse, pissing in a bottle for three days, living on gel protein packs and Phil's voice in his comm. 

Clint's teetering on the edge of sleep, trying to watch the grainy television coverage of the breaking news about a human trafficking ring being exposed in the Thames docklands. Good thing he knows all the major players; he can barely hear the news anchor between the fuzzing and buzzing of the aerial reception.

There's a stifled grunt of discomfort from the bathroom, and that catches Clint's attention enough that he wakes up a little, though he barely raises his head from the pillow. Phil has a long stripe of butterfly bandages down his shoulder, reinforcing the slice that Clint had emptied a tube of tissue glue into as they stumbled away from the bloodbath at the warehouse. 

"Need help?"

"Mmf," Phil says, because he's peeling a bandage apart with his teeth. "It's a little sore." He sticks the flesh-coloured square patch on his bicep and smoothes it down. It looks like a nicotine patch.

Clint's losing the fight with sleep. He watches Phil cross the room and lay a towel down to keep blood off the sheets. "Didn't know you smoked."

Phil sighs as he settles down. "I don't."

Clint's out like a light before he can ask any more questions.

**

Phil is prepping coursework when Clint comes into his office. It's two weeks after London, and even though Clint's been cleared for active duty, Phil is still on light duty while his shoulder heals.

"Can you define our relationship?" 

That makes Phil look up from his computer with a quizzical expression. "I would need to know the context.."

"I need a reference for this thing." The apartment application has been in his back pocket for probably a week now, and it's crumpled and refolded a bunch of times and Clint thinks maybe he should have put it somewhere safe instead. But Phil takes it without comment and reads it over.

"You're looking for off-base residences? You don't have to deal with this personally." 

"No, I want to do this like a real grown up." Clint hates struggling with paperwork, but having Phil around makes it better. It just makes more sense. "But what I can't decide is what I put down as our relationship, I can't really put down 'guy who okays me killing people' on a reference sheet." Clint digs his hands in his pockets, feeling more nervous than he should. "I think we've done a lot more together than people who just work in the same place." Clint's thinking specifically about sharing bathrooms, sharing beds, sharing bandages. He's pretty sure Phil is too.

Phil shrugs. "You can put me down as your supervisor if you want-" but he sees Clint's forehead wrinkle when he says that, and changes tack: "- would you prefer co-worker? Friend?"

"Yeah, I like 'friend.' That seems right." And more importantly, it makes Clint feel good to write that into the blank space to the left of Phil's name, where 'RELATIONSHIP TO APPLICANT' is typed.

"Are you sure you don't want something more official?" Phil rifles through his top desk drawer. "I have letterhead from several of our front companies I can use. You're listed as a board member for one of them"

Clint shakes his head, "Thanks, but this is kind of a personal thing. I'd rather it be a personal reference. You know?"

"Yes. Yes I do." Phil smiles and takes his pen, the nice one with the special nib and the navy blue ink, and fills out the signature and date on Clint's form. "When do you hear about it?"

Clint shrugs. "Since I don't even know what I'm doing tomorrow, I'm not gonna wait by the phone. I hope sooner than later."

**

Sometimes, Phil Coulson is just too much of a badass to be believed. Sure, his security clearance is probably miles above what Clint's is supposed to be, but the suits he wears make Clint forget that beneath that mild-mannered, paper-pushing exterior is a Special Forces Captain with years of Black Ops experience. Which is why he always gets a thrill from sharing range time with Phil, or watching him school rookies in Advanced Self Defense With Improvised Weapons.

Actually, the Improvised Weapons class is probably his absolute favourite to watch. There's a SHIELD tactical training run that's mocked up like an alleyway, including garbage cans, bags of trash and discarded bottles, and whatever else a greasy city alleyway might have living in it (except rats: there's a rule against 'pets' on base). Clint likes to drop in when Phil's running the course and hang out on top of the fire escape and watch the baby agents try to outdo him.

This month he's seen Phil take a vodka bottle to the kneecap, block a two-by-four with his bare forearm, and intercept a broken brick to the groin without flinching. The baby agents wear body armour and mouth guards: Agent Coulson does not.

Afterwards, Phil's got an ice pack wrapped around his wrist, but it's not really impeding his report card writing as he reviews the closed-circuit footage from the training run. Clint has a bag of microwave popcorn and has made himself comfortable on the industrial couch in the corner of Phil's office.

"That girl's got a good throwing arm," Clint says with his mouth full. He's run the footage backwards and forwards about five times now, watching the chunk of brick fly in a flawless trajectory. "She aims for where you're gonna be, not where you are. That's impressive."

Phil nods. "Chow was a competitive fencer. She's being streamed to marksmanship. You'll get her next month for training I think." He watches as Clint pauses the footage right before the projectile makes contact and shudders.

"This is like America's Most Painful Home Videos," Clint cringes. "Ugh. My nuts are sore just thinking about that. You got an ice pack for that, too?"

"Mmm, no," Phil shuffles his report cards, "I'm fine."

"Holy crap, are you ever a hundred percent more of a badass than I figured," Clint shakes his head and lets the tape play, a 57-mph fastball of jagged brick from 30 feet away. Phil just shrugs and turns to the next report.

**

Medical is definitely Clint's least favourite place to be, and he's been in some terrible places in the line of duty. Interrogated by Czech gangsters wielding rusty pliers and razor blades? No problem, he's got skin grafts on ice for occasions just like that.. There's a metal bar reinforcing the healed break in his femur from the last time he got thrown off a building and managed to miss the dumpster. Even when the only injury he's incurred on a job is a blister on his palm from sliding down a line too fast, he still ends up in Medical at the end of it, and it's horrible.

The blister's not the problem. He's got sterile saline and clean gauze and it doesn't even really hurt anymore. He got the blister rappelling into a bunch of goons to retrieve Agent Coulson. And it's Phil that's really, really the problem.

He was ok for a bit, after Clint took out the goons and whisked Phil out through the underground service entrance of the hotel in a hotwired delivery van. But in general, taking an antique German bayonet to the thigh is problematic, even though Phil was probably the best candidate for the procedure. But by the time Clint had gotten them to the extraction point, Phil was grey in the face and the tourniquet wasn't holding, and crap, for the first time ever Clint was actually glad to see SHIELD medics.

When Phil was finally stable and the surgeons got his veins closed and marvelled at how the bayonet missed the femoral artery (or Phil would have been dead), and he was awake and asking for paperwork, Clint went to see him.

Phil's propped up with his leg elevated and gauze stuck over his inner elbow from the transfusion. He's also got a drip in the back of one hand that's delivering SHIELD's industrial-strength painkillers. Clint hates it for the way they make his head foggy, but the high can be nice if he's not trying to concentrate at the time. 

"You're looking a lot better," he tells Phil. When Phil sees him, his face breaks into a sort of goofy smile that just confirms Clint's suspicions about the painkillers. "Oh yeah. A lot. How are you feeling?"

"Please tell me you brought me something to do," Phil fumbles at Clint's sleeve and manages to grab his wrist. "I bled on my phone and I didn't get to finish the roster for next week's exercises."

"You're gonna have to give that to someone else for a while, I think," Clint says with a shrug. "The medical team is counting their blessings they patched you up. You were pretty rough for a bit."

There's a silence in the room, but then;

"They've seen worse," Phil says. "Much worse."

Clint sits down on the only thing he can find - the corner of Phil's bed - and says nothing for a while. Phil's heart monitor is beeping quietly in the corner and the steady pulse is reassuring. They're safe here, and whatever Phil needs to say he can..

"Before you were recruited, there was an op in Dubai. I wasn't supposed to be in charge but the Lead Agent was compromised. Drugs. There was torture. I… distracted them long enough for team extraction. They got me back eighteen hours later."

Clint's seen the pale borders of skin grafts along Phil's hips, where his towel rides low in the unconscious moments after a shower, or more recently when the medics cut away his trousers from the wound across the swell of his thigh. Since Clint has similar scars across his forearms (pliers and razor blades, remember?) he never asked.

"I'm glad you're okay," Clint says.

**

Then Clint's gone for six days on an op in Brazil, and when he comes back he has a debrief with an agent who is very much not Coulson. Clint had to fight off an attempted garrotting, so he's nursing a swollen trachea and a line of nasty little stitches across his throat. The brief room table is a frustrating sea of paperwork and diagrams, and Clint wants nothing more than to crawl away into a dark room to lick his wounds, but when he's finally dismissed, he thinks better of it. After all, Phil's been released from Medical and he's back in his own quarters on base.

He doesn't sneak in through the ceiling: that would be unwise, as well as cruel. He takes his time picking the lock, and takes care that he makes enough noise that Phil knows he's there. Phil's in bed when Clint shuts the door behind him, still dozy and drowsy on painkillers. There's an orthopaedic pillow between his knees, and he doesn't move at all when Clint takes over the edge of his mattress. The bed dips under Clint's weight, and that's when Phil's eyes draw open.

"How's your leg?" His voice is hoarse, little more than a whisper.

"Mmh," Phil says, drawing a hand over his eyes as he resurfaces to consciousness. "Gave me drugs. Walking. Got a cane." By his slow, deliberate movements, Clint can tell he's still under the influence. He settles stiffly onto the pillows, still wearing his tac vest and vambrace. Phil's gaze takes in his body armour and the purple bruising around his neck. "What happened to you?"

"Target had sneaky bodyguards but I made the shot." It's still painful to talk, but it's a definite improvement from having piano wire digging a bloody furrow in the skin of his neck.

"Of course you did." Phil says, struggling to shift to his back. The sheets shift around his shoulders and he's not wearing a t-shirt. Clint sees the tail end of that scar, the furrow across the bones of Phil's shoulder where a shithead human trafficker dragged a knife through the layers of his clothing and skin. It reminds him just how much they have risked for each other in their years together.

"You should have been in Cascavel" Clint whispers, just lying there next to Phil, tracing the healed line down his shoulder with two fingers. "Could have got him off my back before he tried to throttle me. Now I have to wait until medical clears me for duty again."

"I don't mind scars," Phil murmurs. "They add character."

"Mmm, then we both gotta lot of character." Clint's fingers stop at a square of vinyl and adhesive, the ever-present derma patch he's seen Phil with as far back as he can remember. He traces the outline gently, thumbing the corner back down where it's peeling away from Phil's bicep. "You still quitting smoking?"

Phil shifts until he's lying on his back, watching the ceiling. "I still don't smoke," he says gently.

"Well then?"

"It's hormones."

"Huh." Clint doesn't even sound surprised in his own ears. "Guess that's better than nicotine. What for?"

Phil barely pauses, but the hesitation is still there; "I was castrated in Dubai." The information is in his medical file, the senior medical staff are all aware, it's just not common knowledge. "I never found out if it was intentional, or if the interrogators were just amateurs. So I have supplemental testosterone in patches."

Clint rolls onto his shoulder and frowns at Phil. "Does this explain why you are such a badass?"

Phil chuckles, just a tiny bit, in the back of his throat. "No, that's all training. The hormone therapy just makes sure I don't lose muscle mass or start having hot flashes."

Clint muses on this new information for a few moments. "You seem pretty cool with it."

"Well, it's been a few years. I got patched up. I never wanted kids so it's not really an issue."

"Not performance issues? I mean, that's what I'd be worried about."

Phil shrugs. "Not really. If anything, I'm more in control. I don't have inappropriate physical reactions. Like now, for instance. A few years ago if you'd crawled into my bed in the middle of the night like this it would have been a whole different story."

"Okay, then I have a question." Clint wriggles in closer to Phil's shoulder, just enough that their bodies are touching. Phil doesn't shift away, which Clint takes as promising sign.

"I'd assumed you'd have more than one."

"Of course I do, but this one's important. Cause I really want to know." Clint's voice is husky and low, and it bottoms out when he whispers, "Do you wanna have sex with me?"

Phil gurgles with the laugh that catches him by surprise. "Yes. Not right this second, all things considered, but yes I do."

Clint butts his forehead against Phil's shoulder in lieu of anything that might hurt either of them too much, and grins. "Just tell me what I have to do and I'll do it."

**

Clint gets the apartment. It’s a little rundown, with uneven hallways paved in original 1940's linoleum and still heated by clanking radiators. It's so different from the metal-panelled, antiseptic quarters that he's used to at SHIELD, and even though the floors are creaky and the walls are a little cracked, it feels more like a place he can be in to just stay. Living on base feels like he's on the clock 24/7. Clint pays some movers to bring in a futon, a flat screen television (with every channel) and tosses his go bag in the back of the closet, and waits about five minutes before he texts Phil.

Phil shows up 25 minutes after Clint's finished making the bed, and he knocks on the door. When Clint opens it, Phil's standing there with the tiniest smile on his lips, leaning almost imperceptibly on his cane.

"Your elevator is a death trap," Phil pronounces. "A week ago I wouldn't have been able to take the stairs."

"There's no noisy upstairs neighbours," Clint shrugs. "And I kinda get a view."

Phil doesn't wait until the door clicks shut before he's pressed against Clint, mouth against open mouth, feeling the swell and spring of ribs under his palms.

"Mmph," is what Phil manages to say, which is awesome because that's basically all Clint is able to articulate right now too. "Nice place."

"Yeah, let me give you the grand tour," Clint manages between breaths, when Phil isn't kissing the hell out of him. "This is the foyer."

"I'm impressed." Phil's voice buzzes against the soft skin of Clint's neck, in the little hollow between his collarbone and shoulder. His teeth are purposeful against flesh and the curve of bone. Clint shudders against him.

"Yeah, it's original." Clint pants. They move backwards together, riding the cracked plaster walls until Clint is pressed against the half-wall to the kitchenette."Look, I got a breakfast nook," he mutters. He's getting hard just rubbing against Phil's hip. 

"Good use of space." Phil's intensely attentive, like he knows exactly where to touch and lick to get a rise out of Clint. He's got Clint's t-shirt off in about fifteen seconds, and then he's methodically biting a trail across Clint's collarbone, mindful of the still-fragile new skin across his throat. For all his sniper training, Clint can't even keep still - or quiet.

"Oh holy fuck," he gasps, as Phil pauses a moment to not only suck on his nipple, but also leave enough of a mark that it'll bruise the next day. "Jesus, Phil-" 

"I assume that through here is the master bedroom?" Phil has a wicked smile on his face, then Clint kisses him into the bedroom with the futon and the flat screen, and there's hands and mouths for a while before Clint comes up for air. He's practically holding himself back, one rough palm against the head of his cock, trying to keep himself from tumbling over the edge. Phil's calmly insistent, he's got total control of what's going on below the belt, and he's helping Clint along with fingers and tongue for a little while. He's stroked himself into a defiant hard on, despite the scars where his scrotum should be, and he's leading Clint's other hand along his length. 

"Here, here. Yeah, that's right," he's coercing just the right amount of movement from Clint's calloused fingers, and Clint can feel Phil's hips twitching against his own.

Then Phil cups his balls almost tenderly, kneading and squeezing with just the right pressure, teasing the underside of his cock with a knuckle, somehow he hits just has the exact right pressure point and Clint can't help himself. He's coming and it doesn't matter….

"Goddammit, ohmygod, Phil…." Clint bites his words back against Phil's shoulder, grinding into Phil's hips with his cock as he comes, and Phil takes himself along for the ride, shivering in his own pleasure beside him.

It takes a few minutes for Clint to catch his breath, and when he can finally unclench his jaw from Phil's collarbone, he sighs in contentment.

"Something you wanted to say?" Phil asks him. His limbs are draped partly over Clint's, the bayonet scar gleaming pink against the silvered lines of old skin graft scars. Clint touches the entry and exit wounds with his fingers and thumb.

"Where did you learn to do that… thing with your knuckle?"

"Experimented. It's been a while. It was good for you?"

"Mmm, yeah." Clint stretches luxuriously against the sheets, raising his arms and hollowing his belly. "What about you?"

Phil smiles beatifically. "Yes," he says, running his palm against Clint's side as the muscles flex and bunch. "It's really nice with someone else."

"Listen, you ever need a someone else, and you do that? Any time." Clint sighs. "Holy crap, I'm starving. Do you want to order pizza? I got about a million channels on the tv if you want to stay for a bit." He wriggles against Phil's hand and bats his eyelashes.

"I'm probably not going to be able to go again, but I can show you a few tips." Phil kisses him and holds him close. "They work just as well with one as they do with two."

"Fuck, yeah, but can we have pants on when the pizza guy delivers? I don't want to screw up my lease."

Phil laughs, and Clint thinks that this is probably going to work out just fine.

END.

**Author's Note:**

> For the warning, although this is a fic dealing in part with Phil's castration, it does NOT include the act itself, nor any negative associations accompanying it.
> 
> **
> 
> I tried really hard to get Perpetual Motion to write this fic for me, but she was busy (with her career - sheesh!!) and the idea just would not leave me alone. This is way sappier than I meant to have it turn out, but I am a sucker for adorable first-times, particularly when there are complications to the relationship.
> 
> And even though it's written now, I still would love to see other versions of it. I fully endorse any further attempts!!!!


End file.
